After a near-death experience, a Bank of America VP started the charity that Wall Street is talking about

One minute Noah Cooper was jogging on the treadmill in his
apartment complex's gym, the next he was passed out with an
arrhythmia — a condition causing his heart to beat irregularly —
while a neighbor performed CPR.

And that wasn't even the worst of it. Cooper, then 27 years old
and a vice president at Bank of America Merrill Lynch,
encountered severe complications during his recovery at Bellevue
Hospital — and in the end, only a little known, underfunded
technology at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital saved his life.

That was two years ago, and now Cooper is on a mission to promote
the treatment that saved him — "extracorporeal membrane
oxygenation," or ECMO.

Cooper teamed up with close friend Rob Sanzillo, a lawyer at
Herrick Feinsten in New York, and founded Hearts of ECMO to raise money for
research and to help spread the technology to hospitals around
the country.

Essentially, ECMO technology works as an external, mechanical
lung and heart to help oxygenate someone's blood when their
organs stop working. It pumps blood out of the patient's body
through a tube, oxygenates the blood in a machine, and then
returns it to the heart through another tube.

Here's an explainer from Hearts of ECMO's website:

In Cooper's case, his lungs were seriously damaged when doctors
induced a coma and put him into "therapeutic hypothermia" after
the treadmill incident to minimize damage to his organs. They had
him breathing on a respirator, but then couldn't take him off of
it until his lungs had healed. That's why he needed the ECMO
treatment.

Sanzillo's story

Throughout Cooper's month-long hospital stay, Sanzillo, who'd met
Cooper back during their college baseball days (Sanzillo played
for Johns Hopkins University and Cooper for Columbia), visited
him nearly every day.

Then, just weeks after Cooper's treatment, Sanzillo's father
suffered complications from a heart transplant and suddenly
needed ECMO treatment too.

At the time, Sanzillo didn't realize how rare ECMO treatment was.
But its effect, for him, was obvious.

"Without it, I would have lost my dad and my best friend," he
said.

He and Cooper set a $25,000 fundraising goal for 2015, but
already they've raised closer to $80,000.

To do more (and to celebrate what they've done so far) they're
holding a
Spring Benefit at 404 in Manhattan on Saturday, with
cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, and dancing. Expect young Wall Street
to be there en masse.

"ECMO is something that doesn’t receive the proper attention and
receive the proper funding," Cooper said. "We thought that
starting something to help a cause that’s so meaningful to us
would definitely be rewarding."